China's First Self-Developed AI Weather Forecast System Goes Live

FengQing, an AI-powered global ensemble weather forecast system, has passed its operational review and officially joined China's national weather services. Led by the National Meteorological Center with universities and research institutes, it is China's first operational AI ensemble forecast model with fully independent data, models and computing power.

The system was trained on a 100,000-card AI4S supercomputing cluster at the National Supercomputing Tianjin Center. It combines Vision Transformer architecture with physics-based weather algorithms to capture the uncertainty of atmospheric movement, improving forecasts for heavy rain, typhoons and severe storms.

It can deliver forecasts up to 11 days ahead, with several key indicators beating the latest AI ensemble system from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Generating global forecasts in minutes, it will support disaster prevention, transportation and energy scheduling across China.